Say Everything, Scott Rosenberg's history of blogging
Scott Rosenberg, the co-founder of Salon, has written an excellent new book called Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters.
It's well-researched and very entertaining. Scott interviewed me last year and there's an entire chapter about Boing Boing in it. He also has chapters about Justin Hall (who started the blog Links From the Underground in 1996), Dave Winer, Jorn Barger (who coined "weblog" for his Robot Wisdom blog), Blogger founders Ev Williams and Meg Hourihan, and Heather Armstrong of Dooce, among others.
Above, an interesting video in which Scott tries to identify the very first blogger. It's sort of like trying to find the first rock'n'roll song.
UPDATE: Scott says: "There are two whole chapters of the book available at the book's site at sayeverything.com -- the profile of Justin Hall and the chapter about Journalists vs. Bloggers."
Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters
the latest
latest episodes
I think that the original (and very widely read) blog was Marc Andreessen's list of cool sites on the web, circa 1993. Like a blog, new entries were created at the top, with dates, and if I recall correctly, he used anchor tags so there were even permalinks.
Looking forward to reading the book.
shift.com (no longer in existence) did a story written by Shawna Steinberg back in 1997 (I believe) featuring "On-line diarists" which I was fortunate enough to be profiled in (http://www.geocities.com/bastard_lips/) along with several other diarists.
The story itself was cutting edge publishing, built in shockwave/flash and was rather ingenious. I wish I had a copy of the file.
It's a fascinating journey to see where things started from to today. I miss the craftsmanship that was required back then to publish each update although I wouldn't change my wordpress for anything.
Oh, lord. As one of those "on-line diarists" in 1997, I can't emphasize enough how uninteresting I find this. Enough with the navel-gazing.
@MB Self exposition is navel gazing. Since both our blogs are still being updated, we are at least still interested in our own lint.
How doing it online became a global cultural phenomena I do find interesting. To each their own fuzz.
Peace
@RightReverendRex
I just took a quick glance at shift.com via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, but it seems that the Flash/Shockwave files weren't being archived back then (1997-98).
Coincidentally, I did come across this Cory Doctorow book review from February 2003, though.
Chaos Manor by Jerry Pournelle may be the earliest web log. He began it as a "day book" during the Compuserve, GEnie, Source heyday. Debatable I'm sure but his site is one of my daily visits to this day. %-)
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/
@radioguy-
Thanks for checking. I tried the wayback machine a few times over the years and found the same results. There was an html version for the non-shockwave users, but it apparently didn't get picked up. would be fun to revisit it. le sigh.